The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino

Author:Charles Pellegrino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The last decades of Earth saw the spread of virtual-reality addiction and the emergence of a class of people who called themselves Zoners. As a rule, they accepted dead end jobs, lived in sparsely furnished apartments or in their parents’ basements, and spent all their nonworking hours “plugged in” to the best equipment their earnings could buy. The Zoners were almost exclusively men in their twenties. They showed no interest in either wives or children and, if civilization had lasted, would surely have marched quietly toward extinction. It seemed to some observers to be a lonely, pointless life; but the Zoners did not drag race drunkenly on Saturday nights, rob, or commit murder anywhere except in their private VR worlds, and it could even be argued that by not breeding, they were increasing, infinitesimally, the average intelligence level in the human gene pool.

Still, more than a third of Earth’s population succumbed to this super couch-potato existence. The most popular programs, when the end came, were the simulated lives of real people—which meant that there actually lived a Howard Stern and a Stephen Jay Gould, a Harrison Ford and a Harlan Ellison who never guessed that their lives were just somebody else’s VR program.

About the time the first virtual lives became available, not very long after the two thousandth birthday of a very interesting man from Nazareth, the Resurrectionist movement began in Egypt. In the immediate aftermath of the Plague Years, an obscure sect began spreading out of Thebes. Anointing themselves as the Lords of the Last Days, they revived the religion of the ancient Egyptians, quickly won over wealthy New Age converts, and placed at the center of their lives the warrior-messiah Tuthmosis III. From fewer than a dozen mummified cells they were able to reconstruct the entire genetic blueprint of the man many believed to be the Pharaoh who had invaded the Mount of Megiddo and looked Moses in the eye.

Soon afterward, a Resurrectionist priestess birthed him into the twenty-first century, thereby turning an ancient religious belief into what gave all the appearance of being prophecy. From that moment, even the most pragmatic minds were forced to wonder if the old obsession with preserving pharaoh’s body to insure his resurrection had been based not upon superstition but upon actual foreknowledge that cloning technology would one day exist.

At the age of nine, the child-king was anointed God-king, and took the throne at Karnak. By this time, the technology that had permitted an identical twin of Pharaoh to rule thirty-seven centuries after his death had become widely available, and the Resurrectionists had begun dividing into opposing factions; and as something much like the Egyptian concept of Judgment Day approached from the direction of Sagittarius, it did indeed appear that the dead walked the Earth, and that the prophets had returned.

Only the followers of Islam resisted. They viewed virtual people in general, and cloned prophets in particular, as abominations against God; but it was their rejection of zoning technology that made all the difference in the world for them.

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